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Agawa Canyon Tour Train retraces Group of Seven’s journey

A century ago, the Group of Seven found the rugged wilderness north of the Soo to be a muse and now art lovers can retrace their steps thanks to the Agawa Canyon Tour Train.

The Agawa Canyon Tourist Train parked in Agawa Canyon, where passengers can disembark and take in scenery immortalized by the Group of Seven on their painting expeditions to Algoma. (Rick McGinnis)

One of the Moments of Algoma easels and artist's stools placed around the Algoma and Lake Superior region to commemorate work done by the Group of Seven in the area. (Rick McGinnis)

A view of the Bridal Veil Falls in Agawa Canyon, where the Agawa Canyon Tourist Train stops to let passengers hike near several Group of Seven painting locations. (Rick McGinnis)

Artist Eileen Halfpenny gives advice to passengers on the Agawa Canyon Tour Train during a painting lesson on the way back to Sault Ste. Marie. (Rick McGinnis)

The author's attempt at copying a F.H. Varley painting of Georgian Bay in watercolour on the return journey of the Agawa Canyon Tour Train. (Rick McGinnis / For the Toronto Star)

A replica of the boxcar that Group of Seven artists lived in during their painting trips along the Algoma Central Railway, now on display in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. (Rick McGinnis)

Chippewa Falls, near the shore of Lake Superior by Agawa Bay, one of the locations immortalized in paintings by the Group of Seven on their trips to the Algoma region after the First World War. (Rick McGinnis)

By Rick McGinnisSpecial to the Star

Thu., Aug. 10, 2017

SAULT STE. MARIE, ONT.—The painter Lawren Harris arrived here in the summer of 1918 with his life in crisis. A nervous breakdown has gotten him discharged from the Canadian army, sparked by the death of his brother on the battlefields of France and his friend, the painter Tom Thomson, in a canoeing accident in Algonquin Park. He was looking for solace and inspiration and famously found it in the rugged wilderness just north of the Soo.

The path Harris took that summer — and would later retrace with fellow Group of Seven artists J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Carmichael, A.J. Casson and Frank Johnston — is much easier to follow today, thanks to the Agawa Canyon Tour Train, a day trip that runs on the Algoma Central Railway tracks from Sault Ste. Marie to Agawa Canyon.

It has become a pilgrimage site for fans of the Group of Seven and Canadian art as important as Thomson’s shack at the McMichael Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., and his beloved Algonquin.

The Soo is probably the same humble, self-contained little city it was when Harris first arrived there, squeezed between the apron of the Canadian Shield and the broad St. Marys River that drains Lake Superior into Lake Huron.

While you’re waiting for the train, visit the Art Gallery of Algoma in the riverfront park, with its tidy collection of paintings by Group members as well as their predecessors and descendents in Canadian art.

The painters of the Group of Seven bragged about their rugged woodsmanship, but the trips up to Algoma were made tolerable thanks to Harris, a heir to the Massey-Harris fortune. He rented a boxcar from the A.C.R., fully kitted out with bunks, a stove and water tanks.

“A car to live in, eat in and work out of,” Harris excitedly wrote to MacDonald. “They will move us about as we desire and leave us on auspicious sidings that we may proceed to biff the landscape out of a cocked hat at our sweet will.”

The Soo’s tourism agency has parked a replica of the famous boxcar, built for a TVO film about the Group of Seven, by the complex of fine stone buildings that once housed the St. Marys paper mill. The tracks of the Agawa Canyon Tour Train pass nearby, but passengers embark at a more prosaic location next to the shopping mall by the river.

The Agawa Canyon Tour Train has a dining car that is, like most of the train, reconditioned rolling stock from the Algoma Central line. The train pulls out at 8 a.m. sharp and quickly hits the rocks, trees and water of the Shield, a landscape that the A.C.R. tried and failed to fill with farms and towns, for obvious reasons.

Harris and his painter friends often painted there in the fall, when the colours were most vivid, and the Agawa Canyon train is often booked to capacity when the autumn leaves turn colour.

Harris was enthralled with what he saw, raving about its “richness and clarity of colour,” while MacDonald went even further, writing to his wife that it had “all the attributes of an imagined Paradise,” with a “smooth shimmering infinity of waters” that evoked “a glimpse of God himself.” A vast rocky outcrop that MacDonald called “The Solemn Land” in a 1921 painting suddenly looms in the distance out of the train window, picked out in the summer sunlight and living up to his awestruck prose.

Key locations where the Group of Seven painted are commemorated along the region by a series of markers arranged by Soo tourism and dubbed “Moments of Algoma” — a big easel with notes and reproductions of paintings and a helpful little metal replica of a folding painter’s stool in front. They include locations like Bridal Veil Falls near where the train stops at the end of the line in Agawa Canyon, painted by Harris in 1918, with its shimmering white water cascading down a looming rock face.

Eileen Halfpenny, a local watercolour artist, can be hired for painting lessons on the train, and on the way back, she gives us a set of paints and a choice of Group of Seven paintings to try and copy.

I pick an iconic Varley painting from Georgian Bay and try to remember my high school art classes while Eileen gives helpful hints on how less is more with watercolour. My result at least cursorily resembles Varley’s original.

With another day in the Soo, we drive up Hwy. 17 toward the north shore of Superior, where Harris in particular had revelations that changed his painting forever.

We stop at the easel and stool by Chippewa Falls, painted by MacDonald in 1919, then head north toward the pictographs at Agawa Rock. The vastness of Lake Superior is on our left, a huge, cold inland sea with deceptively clear blue water by its shore on this morning.

Just a few miles offshore from Batchawana Bay lies the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a sobering thought, but that bit of Canadian mythology can probably wait for another time.

Rick McGinnis was hosted by Tourism Sault Ste. Marie, which didn’t review or approve this story.

When you go:

Do this trip: The Agawa Canyon Tour Train (agawatrain.com) runs from June to October. Adult prices are $91.15 (summer) and $109.73 (fall). The trip runs from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Multi-night packages start at $176.

Art Class: Artist Eileen Halfpenny can be booked to teach art classes on the Agawa Canyon Tour Train through her website, www.ehalfpennyart.com, at $250 per person, plus the cost of a train ticket, with a maximum class size of six.

Get there: Porter has up to three flights every weekday from Billy Bishop to Sault Ste. Marie.

Stay: There’s no shortage of hotels or bed & breakfasts in the Soo, but the Holiday Inn Express on Bay St. is just a short walk to the Agawa Canyon depot.

Do your research: Tourism Sault Ste. Marie (saulttourism.com) has a very informative website, while Moments of Algoma’s site (momentsofalgoma.ca) features Group of Seven info.

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